Arduino Tutorial: Temperature Sensor

If you’re like me, every morning before you leave for work you wonder whether you should wear a jacket before heading outside. You might not have time to check outside your front door, but you always have time to check your iPhone! :]

The problem is, standard weather apps tell you about the temperature in a nearby city or suburb – but not necessarily about extremely local conditions. And what about that aquarium you would like to monitor, or your mini indoor greenhouse?

This is a job for the latest open source microcontroller – the Arduino.

In this tutorial, you’ll build an Arduino project for the iPhone that lets you connect multiple temperature probes you can place in different locations and query for their readings.

Keep reading to learn more about the Arduino, find out what materials you’ll need for this tutorial, and finally – build your own networked temperature-monitoring station!

What You’ll Need

This tutorial requires some specific hardware components to interface with the temperature probes. You’ll be making use of a microcontroller (the Arduino), an Ethernet interface, and connecting status and temperature probes. If you’ve completed other Arduino tutorials on the site, you should have some of these parts – and as a budding electronics hobbyist, now is your chance to begin a collection of reusable modules!

The full parts list of required components is below, with URLs to purchase them. The total cost of all the parts is approximately $160 USD. If this seems like a lot of money, remember that you are stocking yourself with plenty of components that you can tinker with beyond this tutorial. If you’ve done previous tutorials, then you already have an Inventor’s Kit and maybe the Ethernet Shield, which drops the total price to $38.00.

If you already have various breadboards, USB cables, resistors and LEDs, then you can just buy the Arduino Uno Board DEV-11021 at $29.95 (Quantity 1). Though the inventor’s kit above is still a great buy, just to have a toolbox of spare parts!